Child sexual abuse is predictable and preventable when we surround children with knowledgeable and outspoken adults. Whether you have ever stopped to acknowledge it or not, our children are surrounded by adults...but are they knowledgeable and outspoken about child sexual abuse on behalf of our children?

Although having individual parents or a core group of staff members go through our free Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Best Practices training is essential, it's simply not enough. You need to surround children with staff, volunteers and many parents who are all knowledgeable about how abuse happens and specifically aware of the boundaries that have been put in place to reduce the risk of sexual abuse. This is a crucial component needed to stop child molesters in their tracks. Accountability is essential to the success of the Child Sexual Abuse Best Practices program and is only achievable by training many surrounding adults on the established boundaries and engaging them in the assessment and enforcement process.

As an advocate, you will learn how to educate and empower the adults who surround children in your community. By doing this, you are not only creating a circle of safety around specific groups of children, you will encourage the members of your audience to invite you into other organizations and neighborhoods to empower even more adults. Together you are putting undetected offenders on notice that you're watching and the children in your community are off limits!

The recommended training for parents and youth-serving organizations includes the following two classes:

Raise your level of awareness of the child sexul abuse pandemic and its consequences

Visualize and transform YOUR world into a safer place for kids

Teach you to recognize vulnerability patterns, risky behaviors and signs of abuse

Discuss barriers that keep people from talking about abuse and taking appropriate action

Understand your responsibility to protect kids and respond to abuse

Child Sexual Abuse Prevention BoundariesThe objective of this class is to discuss the boundaries outlined in Best Practices #3 in depth.

Our ability to educate and empower adults differs depending on the level of control we have over them. As an example, a youth-serving organization can easily make it mandatory for all staff and volunteers to attend a 2-hour training class but can only "offer" the opportunity for parents to join them. A parent can make a training course a pre-requisite for anyone who will have private access to their children but can only "ask" their friends and extended family to take the training so they can be an effective member of their child's accountability team. All of us can expand the community accountability team by giving one of TAALK's Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Training cards to adults we come in contact with such as our neighbors, the grocery store clerk, the mechanic, etc. When you and the adults who surround the children in your community take the same training, it will ensure that you all have the same understanding and expectation of how to protect children.